odds and ends / 6.21.2024

 

Albert Weisgerber: illustration for “The Seven Ravens” from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1912). Via The Public Domain Review.

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Ad from a catalog issued by The Keeley Stove Company for Morning Light Stoves, Philadelphia, 1889.

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Mosaic-decorated stove from La Maison Picassiette (The Plate-Stealer's House) in Chartres, created by Raymon Eduoard Isidore between 1938-1964; photographed by John Vere Brown for The World of Interiors, January 1982.

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Metalwork by George Greaves.

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Albert York, "Figures in a Field," 1963. Via Peter Shear.

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Cy Twombly's notes on George Seferis' "Solstice," via Edmund de Waal.

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At the heart of the mysteries of the Vedas, revealed by the people of India, lies the Altar of Fire: a sacrificial construct made from bricks laid down in precise mathematical proportions to form the shape of a huge bird of prey—an eagle, or a hawk, perhaps. According to Roberto Calasso, it was a gift from the primordial deity at the origin of everything: Prajapati, Lord of Creatures. When his children, the gods, complained that they could not escape from Death, he gave them precise instructions for how to build an altar that would permit them to ascend to heaven and attain immortality: “Take three hundred and sixty border stones and ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, as many as there are hours in a year,” he said. “Each brick shall have a name. Place them in five layers. Add more bricks to a total of eleven thousand, five hundred and fifty-six.” The gods built the altar and fled from Mrtyu, Death itself. However, Death prevented human beings from doing the same. We were not allowed to become immortal with our bodies; we could only aspire to everlasting works. The Vedic people continued to erect the Altar of Fire for thousands of years: with time, according to Calasso, they realized that every brick was a thought, that thoughts piled on top of each other created a wall—the mind, the power of attention—and that that mind, when properly developed, could fly like a bird with outstretched wings and conquer the skies.

Benjamín Labatut, "The Gods of Logic," Harpers, July 2024. 

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"I sometimes think," said Olivia, "from watching, of course, because I am not experienced, I think experience can be a—block." Again it was clumsy, but she knew what she meant.

"And why?" asked Angela, amused.

"Because if you think you know, you don't ask questions," said Olivia slowly, "or if you do ask, you don't listen to the answers." Olivia had observed this often. "Everyone, everything, each thing, is different, so that it isn't safe to know. You—you have to grope."

Rumer Godden, An Episode of Sparrows. 

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It’s a persistent human error; we cannot resist trying to understand what we are hardwired not to. If anything, the death of God has left a conspicuously empty seat in the rafters that we keep trying to inhabit—that purely transcendent, objective vantage outside the totality of things. Spinoza called it sub specie aeternitatis. Hannah Arendt named it “the Archimedean point.” Thomas Nagel termed it the “View from Nowhere.”

Meghan O'Gieblyn, "The Trouble With Reality." The New York Review, 3/21/2024.

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An ivory ribbon, a speckled lobster, blown poppies, a lascivious oyster. A hand mirror reflecting a whitish lake, a heavy key. These are seen to be her concerns, lacquerish, decorative, romantic. But the hand mirror fills with blood, the cabinet of wonders displays a skull. On the other side of the pomegranate, maggots like instinct pearls.

Patricia Lockwood, "Isn't that ... female?" The London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12., 6/20/2024.

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Stephanie remembered other libraries ... She remembered the sensation of knowledge, of grasping an argument, seizing an illustration, seeing a link, a connection, between this ancient Greek idea here and this 17th-century English one, in other words. Knowledge had its own sensuous pleasure, its own fierce well-being, like good sex, like a day in bright sun on a hot empty beach. She thought of these various lights, Plato’s sun, Daniel’s body, that first moment of Will’s separate life, herself in sunlight, and thought, as she had not thought clearly for some long time, of ‘my life’, of the desired shape of ‘my life’ as it had seemed so clear and so bright in that earlier library. She thought: this will not do, I must think about the ‘Immortality Ode’, I have no time, any more. And saw that she was thinking about the ‘Immortality Ode’, that the poem was about all these things, the splendour in the grass, the need for thought, the shape of a life, the light.

A.S. Byatt, Still Life. 

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"We should all be so lucky to have a cathedral that no one will see."

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read lately / 5.25.2021

 

David Wojnarowicz: Untitled (Face in Dirt), 1991.

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Her face was the fresh imprint of her age. She spoke the words that were there for her to speak; she wore the only kind of shirt available at that time. It was not possible to see where she would go wrong.

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This.

Olivia Laing has a beautiful house that I see from time to time on Instagram, scrolling as I do looking for bookish interiors and artfully jumbled gardens, and that is why I read Funny Weather. As someone who has cobbled together a precarious career at the edges of writing, I am fascinated by writers whose full-time hustle is getting to think and write about whatever they want, who've achieved a cruising altitude above the grind of proofreading business reports and ghostwriting copy. Plus, it was available at the library and had an appealing cover: calamine-pink, with a memorable David Wojnarowicz photo—Untitled, (Face in Dirt). It is a self-portrait of the artist in black and white, his brow, closed eyes, nose, parted lips, teeth, and chin visible, surrounded by dry dirt clods.

Funny Weather collects a variety of profiles, essays, and reflections Laing wrote in this century's troubled teen years for publications including frieze, New Statesman, and the Guardian on artists, writers, and the politics of the moment. It was published in the U.S. in May 2020. Unlucky timing, maybe, though the book is packaged as a response to the fractures of our time—the subtitle is Art in an Emergency. In the introduction, Laing says that the essays are about artists who make work "concerned with resistance and repair." She writes about the poets and painters of the New York School—lovable Frank O'Hara, etc.; Johns and Rauschenberg and Warhol and Basquiat; Conceptual artists "blow[ing] the bloody doors off the venerable white cube gallery"; musicians much beloved, like David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, and Arthur Russell; white women writers critically lauded, some with TV and movie deals, including Maggie Nelson, Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith, Chris Kraus, and Sally Rooney. 

The idea is that these creators and their works can help when the world shifts:

Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis? In 1967, George Steiner wrote a famous essay in which he observed that a concentration-camp commander could read Goethe and Rilke in the evening and still carry out his duties at Auschwitz in the morning, regarding this as evidence that art had failed in its highest function, to humanize. But this makes art sound like a magic bullet, which should reorganize our critical and moral faculties without effort, while simultaneously obliterating free will. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It's work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it's up to you.

I went back and read the introduction again after I read the book, a bit underwhelmed and perplexed by who was included, and tripped on that "it's up to you." I remember the first time I read anything about Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, two artists Laing writes about here. I was a teenager, and I picked up Calvin Tompkins' Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time. Before I read it, I would have had no idea how to look at a goat stuck in a tire or a painting of flag, and getting clued in to a way to understand them thrilled me. It was like getting a secret decoder ring. And I suppose it was up to me to read the book, but I needed its help to even know where to begin with those artists, and how it got on my parents' bookshelf and the fact that later I could travel to look at goats and flags for myself were products of privilege and circumstance. Art is conversations and convergences, and no one navigates it without guides. 

Laing's essays—thoughtful and accomplished, zeitgeistily enraptured by bodies and the radical potential of queerness—are rooted in love; one section is titled "Love Letters." Reading them feels validating when they are about things I enjoy—the exhilaration of someone smarter than me beautifully explaining why something I already appreciate is worthy, like a stream of happy-making candy-pink hearts bubbling up at the lower righthand corner of the screen. But these days, my love feels a little suspect. I would like to think the fact that white people made so many of my favorite books and songs and movies and works of art is somehow innocent, but it's not, not really. I realize again and again how much I have missed and continue to miss, the ways that how I see is a product of my place and time, and of the market, that wildly unfair space. And this book never let me forget that it is a product. Behind the words, I could see a ribbon of choices unfurling: essays commissioned and paid for by editors and publications looking for clicks and eyeballs, their subjects influenced by curators and galleries and PR people, bundled to create new value for the writer and a publisher. These artists chosen because their work, radical and resistant as it may be in certain contexts, can be understood and packaged and sold by an industry of people who make money convincing someone like me to read, look, think, and buy. Being loved is so very valuable.

Being a persuadable customer of literary criticism, recent reviews sold me on reading Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Klara and the Sun. I had read very little of his other work, though, and decided to go back to his earlier stories. I tumbled into a pair of novels written over thirty years ago about shifting awareness, memory, and culpability that felt uncannily urgent, ideas picked up at the exact right time. 

An Artist of The Floating World and The Remains of the Day are similar in tone and structure (Floating World was published in 1983, several years before Remains of the Day). First-person narration loops backwards from abbreviated moments in the protagonist's present to more discursive moments in the past. Slowly (at least, if you are me, ha) the pieces begin to form a picture. In An Artist of The Floating World, Masuji Oji is a Japanese man on the edge of old age, living in a house that is beautiful but damaged. Around him, the city is rebuilding after war; one daughter is looking to get married, another has a young son. And sideways and slantwise, painfully and in pieces, he is evaluating what his life as an artist has meant as the world around him has changed. As a promising young painter, he came under the sway of a friend who convinced him that his art should be for something, and he chose to break with his teacher and make work that spoke to crisis, a choice that ripples through his life in unsettling ways. In The Remains of the Day, a British butler named Stevens makes a short trip to visit an old colleague, reflecting on his life in service to a Lord Darlington, a man, who, for a handful of years, seemed to be standing at the fulcrum of world events, though just how only slowly becomes clear. I had dim notions that this was a love story (cue the melancholic visages of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thomson) and it is, but not in the way I expected. It, too, is about choices and their repercussions, but Stevens' worldview, prioritizing service and self-sacrifice, blurs his agency. His job was to do what was asked, not to see, not to act, and yet he has to live with the things done and undone, what he saw and what he missed. 

In my memory, that David Wojnarowicz photo registers as an image of resistance. But whenever I actually look at it, I am struck by its ambiguity. It could be burial or it could be emergence. It could be torture or it could be transcendence. Things change so much depending on how you look at them.

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Other book reports.